“’Too sick to work’ but not too sick to riot: One in eight defendants were on incapacity or disability benefit.” Daily Mail, 25 October 2011.
“One in eight of the rioters who caused mayhem and destruction across Britain this summer was on incapacity benefits and unfit for work, official figures revealed yesterday.” Daily Express, 25 October 2011.
“THUGS held in the August riots were part of a feckless criminal underclass — with one in eight on DISABILITY benefits.” The Sun, 25 October 2011.
“ONE in eight thugs who ransacked shops during the summer riots claimed they were too sick to work.” Daily Star, 25 October 2011.
As official figures were released yesterday which analysed the background of those appearing before the courts for August’s rioting, newspapers rushed to publish their judgment on the cause of the riots.
One particularly noticeable theme in today’s reports has been the number of those involved in the riots who were in receipt of different forms of benefits, fuelling support for the online petition campaigning to have benefits taken away from rioters.
In the pursuit of a powerful argument about rioters being ‘benefit cheats’, did the Mail and others cheat with their figures?
Analysis
All four papers claimed one in eight of rioters were on benefits which deemed them unable to work.
At the beginning of each article they qualified this by stating that 60 rioters were on Incapacity benefit while 100 were on Disability Living Allowance. Herein lies their first error.
As the Mail in fact acknowledges, some people may well be on both Incapacity benefit and Disability Living Allowance, making their claim that 160 ‘rioters’ were on disability benefits incorrect. A total of 160 claims for ‘disability’ benefits had been made, however, this correlates to less than 160 people if claims were made for more than one type of disability benefit.
To arrive at the figure of 1 in 8, the papers took this uncertain figure of 160 people as a proportion of the total number of 1,350 defendants whose details were provided, to make 12 per cent, or 1 in 8.
Secondly, and more importantly, most of these papers incorrectly refer to the Disability Living Allowance as a form of incapacity benefit. The Mail’s claim of ‘too sick to work but not too sick to riot’ and the Express’ reference to those ‘on incapacity benefits and unfit for work’ should only relate to those on Incapacity benefit since DLA is given regardless of employment, however, their qualifying figures did include DLA.
However whether by luck or by judgement, the claim that 1 in 8 were on some form of incapacity benefit is actually correct. The number each newspaper failed to report was claimants on the new version of Incapacity benefit, the Employment and Support Allowance, which also came to 100, the same amount as those on DLA.
It seems evident this is more of a lucky coincidence rather than an accurate calculation by the Mail and the Express since they fail to report the ESA figure. Using just the number of those on Incapacity Benefit at 60 people out of 1,350, this is only 4 per cent or around 1 in 22.
This confusion regarding the definition of particular benefits is even more evident in the Sun. This claims an astonishing 260 rioters “were on handouts for being unfit to work”. As the table above shows, this has been calculated by wrongly adding the number of those on DLA with those on Incapacity benefit and ESA.
Furthermore, the Sun’s claim that more than a third were on some kind of benefit should be treated with some caution. A total of 530 rioters were receiving benefits, which out of the total of 1,350 adults brought before the courts for rioting in the Department for Work and Pensions figures is around one third at 39 per cent. However, out of the total of 1,984 defendants, it is 27 per cent.
It is also worth noting that the DWP warned “the dataset on which these figures are based are provisional and are reported here sooner than DWP benefit caseloads are normally released. Therefore there may be some inaccuracies in the benefit caseloads recorded as a result”. Some caution should be taken therefore when making conclusive statements using the data.
Conclusion
Although the claim that 1 in 8 rioters were on out of work benefits was technically correct, the benefits categories selected to explain this were incorrect. The papers all appear to have wrongly added the number of those on DLA, a benefit independent of employment status, to those on Incapacity benefit.
It seems to just be a coincidence that the number on DLA is the same as those on the new form of Incapacity benefit, ESA.
Furthermore, the papers wrongly count each benefit claim as by a different person, despite acknowledging that some claims could have been made by the same person. Therefore, regardless of definition, any reference to the combined number of rioters receiving two different types of benefit could run into problems.
3 Responses
I recently received a breakdown of the background of the employees of a famous and well established organisation. I was actually stunned at the list of misdemeanours and criminal offences carried out by the people working there, and am alarmed that the ‘shareholders’ have not picked up on this.
The organisation has just 635 employees, and the list of their indiscretions is as follows –
29 have been accused of spouse abuse
7 have been arrested for fraud
9 have been accused of writing bad cheques
17 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses
3 have served time for assault
71 cannot obtain a credit card due to bad credit
14 have been arrested on drug related charges
8 have been arrested for shoplifting
21 are currently defendents in lawsuits
84 have been arrested for drink driving
Collectively, this year, they have cost the British taxpayer £92,993,748 in expenses.
So who are these people and which organisation was Brian talking about?
These are the 635 members of The House of Commons! The same people who churn out new laws that we, as citizens, are expected to obey each year!
Still, as citizens we are also ‘the shareholders’ – So you know what do do next time a general election comes round, vote to replace these employees with those who you would trust to do a better job.
After all, who would want a bunch of crooks running their company?
there was a report about this in the daily bullshit otherwise known as the mail .
If 40% are on Benefits that means 60% are in work that is the more worrying figure do they “claim” it is their right to riot because they are employed looks like the slippery road to the no win no fee lawyers.